Hi all,
As you may have heard, I've started temporary contract work for WMF as an
intern in Learning and Evaluation. [1] My work will focus on the Learning
Patterns Library. [2] One of the goals for the internship is to enable
easier and better reporting about grants, including financial reports. When
grantees spend countless hours writing reports, that drains resources that
could be invested in designing and producing more and better programs, and
I've heard that grantees prefer designing and producing programs over
tedious accounting and reporting tasks. You can expect to hear more from me
about learning patterns in the next few months, and I am hoping to hear
constructive ideas from community members and grantees that can be included
in the Learning Patterns Library.
Generally I will use my current Pine accounts for my community roles, and I
will save my WMF accounts for "official" WMF work.
I didn't know about these Finance Fellows either until I saw their profiles
appear on the WMF staff page, and I emailed Garfield to ask about them. A
community consultation in advance about this project would have been
helpful. The goals of these Fellows make sense to me; I've previously had
discussions with Grantmaking about trying to get comparable data across
programs. I too am interested in hearing how WMF Finance will implement
this program, and in particular how it will affect the Cascadia Wikimedians
User Group which I am helping to coordinate. It does worry me a little that
Wikimedia has a famously complicated social, financial, and legal
environment, and there are lots of ways for things to go wrong, especially
when people who have never before worked in this kind of environment are
brought into a role like global finance for the movement. That said, I hope
that Garfield will continue to address the concerns that are being
discussed in this thread, and that the work of the Finance Fellows will be
a net positive for everyone in the long run.
To the Finance Fellows: I hope that you are not discouraged by this
discussion. I've been in this global community for years in a variety of
roles, and I'm still learning. I hope that you have a good experience with
us.
Regards,
Pine
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bgibbs_(WMF)
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.**—Catherine Munro*